


we hear whispers

by spymastery



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game)
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Identity Reveal, M/M, Massage, One Shot Collection, Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-12-01 11:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11485203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spymastery/pseuds/spymastery
Summary: A collection of oneshots on the relationship between Sigismund Dijkstra and Floris Alders, Nilfgaardian spy.





	we hear whispers

Four drops of chamomile oil.

Four drops of lavender.

Three of peppermint, one of clary sage.

Double the recipe for enough to soothe a broad back and broad shoulders.

Floris stirred the mixture around at the bottom of a glazed ceramic bowl with the tip of his forefinger, following the design that was painted onto the surface. The bathhouse was near-empty by this hour, quiet save for a few voices both boisterous and familiar and the boys who swept the floors clear of water.

Behind him, Sigi sat in one of the larger baths. The water swished every now and then, a heavy hand breaking the surface just enough to make a sound. A reminder that he was there, waiting, watching Floris as he prepared the oil.

The room's perfumed air sat heavily around Floris's face, made dense from the steam rising off of the water. Everything within reach proved to be damp – thick glass vials and their cork stoppers, weighty silver candlestick holders, even the table that he worked on. There was nothing in the room that the steam didn't touch. And, over time, there was nothing in the room that the steam didn't warp out of shape.

But things could be replaced. New vials of oil could be bought, candlestick holders could be made, trees could be chopped and hewn and polished and painted.

In the year since he began working at Sigi's bathhouse, Floris had witnessed countless sets of furniture coming and going. He watched as planters full of wilted flowers were removed due to the soil that drowned them. There was only one structure that the water at the bathhouse didn't bloat or buckle – the proprietor himself.

“You've mixed it enough,” Sigi told him. Water rolled around his stomach as he shifted his position on the submerged bench. Floris heard the waves lapping at painted stone, heard them sloshing over the edge and onto the floor. “Something on your mind? You're distracted.”

“I'm not distracted,” he murmured in response, just loud enough for Sigi to hear him over the shouts in the opposite room.

Floris lifted the bowl in both hands and turned, making his way over to the bath on careful feet. He planted his heels to the textured stone tiles before following through onto the balls of his feet. There was no questioning his stability; he was the only attendant who had never slipped and fallen while doing their job.

When he arrived at Sigi's side, Floris perched at the edge of the bath and set the bowl in front of him. The smell that wafted off of the oil inside was pungent, almost enough to burn his nose and throat.

“Quiet, then,” Sigi said, removing his arms from the thick ring of stone around the bath and slipping them deep into the hot water. “You're quiet.”

A smile kissed the corner of Floris's mouth. “I'm always quiet.”

“Cheeky.”

There was no warning in his voice, only a gruff fondness that Floris had come to depend on.

Swiping some oil onto his fingertips, Floris coated his hands and began to rub. There were knots of tense muscle, aching _swaths_ of the same, but much of the tightness gave way beneath a learned touch.

Sigi was soft above his strength, and as Floris kneaded his shoulders and back, some of his latent vitality returned. He sat up straighter, turned his neck farther than he'd been able to only moments before, rolled his arms back to test them.

And as the scent of the oil reached around him, his chest rose and fell more easily.

A quiet sank over them in the wake of Happen shooing off the last of Cleaver's men, all silence save for the rustling of brooms over stone in the next room. Floris rubbed over the warm nape of Sigi's neck, thumbing over the column of his spine and up into the back of his shaved head. Sigi only made the occasional noise – a quiet, pleased huff or a moan as slow as honey.

The quiet was calming, but the quiet was pierced, sharply and surely, with a murmured thought: “Are you planning on leaving when Emhyr contacts you again?” Sigi spoke under his breath, as if musing to himself what the outcome would be. That was the scariest part.

To Floris's credit, his hands did not stop their work, even as his heart fell to the tiles beneath his bare feet.

Months had passed since the last time a cloaked figure had bumped into him while he was out in Hierarch Square, slipping him a letter to be read and to be burned and the ashes swallowed by steaming water. His patriotism stood strong, but was flanked by feelings of abandonment and a tiny, terrified voice that shouted above all others.

“I've been wondering what I should do with you for weeks,” Sigi continued. “Months even. Having you here, knowing what you are, and not acting on that knowledge? It's been doing my head in.”

Floris wet his bottom lip. He thought.

“What am I?” His voice didn't falter. His hands didn't, either.

Some of the tension in Sigi's back returned, tightening the flesh beneath Floris's hands. “You're a ploughing Nilfgaardian spy, Alders.”

Floris shut his eyes and took a deep breath to keep himself steady. He knew that the waters he waded through weren't steaming and scented; they were bloodied and infested with sharks. “Then you know that I haven't been contacted since springtime.”

His thumbs dug into the skin just beneath one of Sigi's shoulders. That his hands hadn't been forced away from the moment his secret was revealed was a good sign. At least, he saw it as one.

“There could be plenty of reasons for that.” Sigi rolled his shoulders back again. His biceps tensed, power rippling under his skin – a show of his strength, as if Floris had any doubt of how physically superior the man was. “To throw me off your trail, to encourage you to send more frequent, to stupefy me into thinking you're dedicated to _me_ now.”

Floris concentrated on the parts of Sigi's back that were worse now than they had been before. No amount of rubbing could ease them, not even with a fresh application of oil.

“Or they found someone whose information was better. Someone who could get the information I gave them and more, twice as often.” Floris chewed over his bottom lip and counted his blessings that Sigi's back was turned. There was no seeing a tell in the choppy reflection on the water. “Or they doubted my ability to glean anything from you, given your own history with spying.”

He hummed, quietly. “I could attempt to find out.”

The hand Sigi cut through the water slowed to a stop.

“You expect me to believe you'd turn your back on Nilfgaard?” Sigi's laugh wasn't a laugh at all. There was no humor in the sound. “For what? Enough crowns to drown yourself in?”

Floris rested both hands in the center of Sigi's back, just over his spine. His skin was soft from soaking and flecked with spots. There were a few scars, fewer than you'd expect though just as deep as you might think. And he was damp, like everything else in the bathhouse.

“For whom.”

“ _What_?”

“For whom,” Floris echoed. He leaned forward, over the edge of the bath and into Sigi's peripheral vision. His ginger braid skimmed over the surface of the water, and his eyes shimmered in the flickering candlelight. There was a youthfulness to his angular face, but also a vein of intelligence. “You inspire a certain amount of... loyalty.”

One of Sigi's unkempt brows rose. “Is that all I inspire?”

Floris opened his mouth to speak, but pressed his lips together soon after. The warmth trapped within the room wasn't the only reason for the ripe color in his cheeks.

“I've been abandoned by my people, by my emperor,” Floris said, pulling away and lifting the bowl in his hands once the oil dried. He brought himself over to the table on the far side of the room where all of his oils sat in a row, ordered by name rather than use or color. “You've known I was a spy for weeks now, and you haven't let me go. Or killed me.”

He twisted around and rested his palms on the table, staring across to Sigi as he rose out of the bath with some effort. Light played off of his skin as the water sluiced over his limbs, around his belly, down his thick thighs.

Floris's eyes snapped up from his body to his face, staring at his small, dark eyes with an unwavering confidence he only felt on the surface.

“So use me,” he offered, watching Sigi as he wrapped a towel around his waist, as he moved across the stone floor towards him. “I can be your tool, same as I was theirs, and I can pull the others out by their roots.”

By the time they were only separated by a foot, perhaps less, Floris was forced to put an arch into his back in order to stare up at the massive man in front of him.

“I don't need spies,” Sigi said, his voice a burr in his throat. “I have what I need there. What I want is a bath attendant who isn't a threat to me or my friends or my business. Is that who you want to be?”

Floris tilted his chin upwards.

“What do you mean?” he whispered. “That's who I am.”


End file.
